Abstract
High reliable and efficient image transmission is of primary importance for space communications. In the traditional space image transmission system design, the source coding module and channel coding module are separated. This separate design, although simple to be implemented, cannot explore the transmission performance to the most. In this article, we propose a joint source–channel rate allocation framework to improve the space image transmission performance. A joint rate allocation algorithm based on the packet loss rate is proposed. For certain required system transmission rate, the optimal source coding and channel coding rate pair can be selected from pre-configured code rate sets by sliding search. In addition, our design has taken into account the progressive scalability feature of the image compression results. Each of the source coding output packets is divided into several sub-packets with different levels of significance and then channel coding with different rates is applied on these sub-packets to achieve unequal error protection. Simulation results show that the proposed joint design can significantly improve the image reconstruction quality. Compared with the traditional separate design, the proposed joint design can achieve 3–5 dB performance gain in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio.
Highlights
With the acceleration of global informatization in our society, the scope of information sensing and communication has been rapidly expanded from terrene to air, space, and even deep space
We proposed a high reliable and efficient space image transmission framework that combines the joint rate allocation and unequal error protection (UEP) technology
The Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) algorithm and the Polar codes are adopted as the source coding and channel coding techniques
Summary
With the acceleration of global informatization in our society, the scope of information sensing and communication has been rapidly expanded from terrene to air, space, and even deep space. The source coding module for image compression and the channel coding module for error protection are implemented separately. The traditional separate coding system which uses equal channel coding rate for different segments of the source coding output bitstreams has not considered the significant difference; it applies the same degree of error protection for all phases of the code stream. The other is the joint configuration approach, by which parameters such as the coding rate of the two modules are jointly configured to tune the entire system to best match the channels Both the types of approaches have been investigated extensively in the context of terrestrial communication scenarios. We aim to propose a joint source– channel coding design for high reliable and efficient space image transmission. Details about the joint rate allocation scheme, the UEP operations, and the algorithm for selection of the optimal rate pair are presented in section ‘‘The proposed joint source–channel rate allocation scheme.’’ Section ‘‘Simulation results’’ evaluates the proposed joint source–channel rate allocation–based transmission system with extensive simulations, followed by the concluding remarks and future research plans in section ‘‘Conclusion and future work.’’
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